


dead boy: gets up, fights

by iimpavid, It_MightBe_Love



Series: the batmom multiverse [3]
Category: DCU (Comics)
Genre: Adoption, Batmom Multiverse, Bonding over books, Family Feels, Found Family, Gen, Happy Ending, Homelessness, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Kid Fic, Parenthood, Trust Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-01
Updated: 2018-07-01
Packaged: 2019-05-31 23:36:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15130199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iimpavid/pseuds/iimpavid, https://archiveofourown.org/users/It_MightBe_Love/pseuds/It_MightBe_Love
Summary: There are references to emotional, physical, and sexual abuse of a minor that are compliant with both canon and fanon. Nothing explicit, however.





	dead boy: gets up, fights

**Author's Note:**

> There are references to emotional, physical, and sexual abuse of a minor that are compliant with both canon and fanon. Nothing explicit, however.

According to some guy named MacDonald-- yeah, MacDonald is his actual name. Makes you wonder if he’s got a farm— three things made for a serial criminal (that’s serial anything, murder, rape, burglary):

  * bedwetting past age 9
  * pyromania
  * cruelty to animals



To people like this, other humans have the approximate value of a cardboard box. Their insides are lightyears more interesting than anything else they could possibly do or be.

That’s what got said on To Catch a Killer anyway, while a certain young vandal was watching while his babysitter was busy blowing his dad in the other room. The babysitter, Dia, she had a lot of problems outside of Willis Todd’s second-rate heroin and one of those problems was that she didn’t have a damn clue how many cats she had. Never got one of them spayed or neutered like Bob Barker was always suggesting on TV. Her apartment smelled strongly of the chemically-sanitized sawdust that filled the dozen litter pans scattered around it’s rooms.

It was food for thought (the MacDonald Triad, not the cat litter) and because Jason’s all of 11 years old and curious to a fault he gnawed at that idea a good long while. Considered the facts that he was a dead ringer for two of the three. He’d been expelled for setting Leslie Carmichael on fire, just lit up the back of her shirt and hair in the middle of a math test with the Bic lighter he’d stolen from his mom’s pocket that morning. He hadn’t felt particularly guilty over it. She was mean as hell to the other girls in gym and a cheater besides.

One of the cats hopped up on the worn arm of the armchair Jason was sat in for his daytime reruns marathon. It was grey. One of its legs was missing, it was probably born without it. It stared at him with impassive blue eyes. He stared back. Tried to imagine what it might feel like to kill it. Tried to convince himself it’d be a mercy since it was three-legged and all. There were a lot of options, assuming he could catch it, could tolerate being scratched and bit.

He tried to figure out whether any part of that would be satisfying or, at least, not-stomach-churning. He might imagine himself into a cold sweat and vomiting if he kept at it.

The cat looked away first, stretched out like taffy along the arm of the chair and basked there in the murky sunlight.

Queasy, Jason petted it in the gentlest strokes he could manage. Setting a classmate on fire was an entirely different matter from killing a cat, of that much he was certain.

Willis finished with Dia. They went home. Jason stayed out of sight with a book for the rest of the day.

Still, the Triad stuck with him. He never entered or left a bodega in the Bowery without petting the resident cat as a sort of promise.

* * *

 

The trick with hide-and-seek is to go slowly. Keep the television on all day and all night so the background noise overrules the shifting, skin-sticking sounds of footprints on naked linoleum and furniture.

Always avoid those places in the hall that are rotting inside and whine with every shift in temperature. Never wear socks because friction is more important than speed. Always step confidently, if softly; this will minimize the noise of hesitation and maximize stability and will be worth every burning muscle. Never bolt when the kitchen light flickers on.

Stay still. Become stone. No one looks at the space between the cupboard and the fridge for bodies full of bird-bones and nerves. It’s the best place to wait.

When the lights flick off don’t ever wait for the bedroom door to close; use his movements to mask the soft sounds of the peanut butter jar and unbagged bread shoved into a pajama shirt. No silverware, though, never silverware. It makes too much noise.

Never stop moving when hunger pangs growl so loud they can be heard over the television, standing right behind it. Eat in the space between the boiler cupboard and the linen closet; it is exposed but it conducts sound the most of any other place in the apartment. Keep track of every sleep-noise and lighter-click and finish eating before he finishes his cigarette or she wakes up. This doesn’t need to be said but: chew closed-mouthed, don’t drop crumbs.

Return the food and slip into the pile of laundry at the foot of the bed. Never the bed; body-shapes are easy to discern on a twin-sized mattress and the first place they’ll look is underneath. If it’s been a bad day or a busy night, climb into the top shelf of the closet. No one looks for their money’s worth there, it’s above their eyeline.

* * *

Jason has zero qualms accepting handouts and has done for as long as he can remember-- at least until truant officers started getting serious about things like child neglect and enforcing stupid ideas about attending public schools. Then he went to school during the day instead of begging. There were, as Jason would come to learn, a great variety of other ways a boy could earn his keep.

But then he gets his sorry ass kicked out of school and by the time his voice starts to crack there's not a district in New Jersey that wants a kid with his record. It's off to work. Begging doesn't make as much money as hooking and Jason? He gets to do whatever he wants as long as the sun's up and the cops can tell he's all of thirteen. He does whatever he wants at night, too, as long as he can convince himself his mom's on the nod and fine without him taking care of her. He'll go days, sometimes a week, sleeping on trains, fixing dogfights across town, helping out with the odd mugging in the Heights.

He's a gofer kinda kid. Reliable. Has gained a reputation for that time he bit off a guy's fingers.

(People have to learn, he knows, the hard way. This particular lesson: you don't touch Jason Todd's face. You don't slap him, you don't flick him, you don't grab him by the chin, you sure as shit don't try sticking your fingers in his mouth. What people have conveniently forgotten: only one of the fingers could be reattached. In a panic he'd swallowed and, well... now a very select few individuals are afraid of the cannibal kid in the Bowery. Being left the fuck alone was almost worth the horrific bout of fever, vomiting and diarrhea in the week that followed.)

He's managed a full week without going home. A full week living on what he can steal and getting cash doing odd jobs for, well, anyone. Although his favorite was the lady with the tenth-floor walk-up and a car trunk overflowing with groceries. She'd been so damn nice and the heating in her apartment worked perfectly. A few more errands like that and he can buy himself a coat.

There's a foot of snow on the ground. One of these days he's gonna hit a growth spurt and actually look old enough to legally rent a motel room and when that happens--

He has no clear idea of what will happen when that happens only that he won't go home. It's not that he's scared. It's that he's sick of Willis's shit and of mom not giving a fuck about living. And fed up with being responsible for keeping the roaches under control, which is a fucking joke and a Sisyphean task at that, and with keeping every cranked up skank with a few bucks to spare fed. He's not scared.

The library at Gotham U is just underfunded enough to have whole sections without security cameras. He can make it from the door back to the stacks if he chooses the right shelves to browse in the right order and in the middle of the stacks there's a couch that no one seems to ever sit on. He steals the cushions from the back and pulls them under one of the tables-- he fits neatly between the rows of chairs still without disturbing them. In the middle of Love’s Labour's Lost he passes out. Face-down and drooling on the carpet a little-- it's not the most-graceful thing but sleep has to be taken wherever its found.

Waking up he stretches and yawns and opens his eyes onto a pair of feet, crossed at the ankle, wearing shoes he knows sell for more than the price of his corpse (or even his living body) on the black market.

"Mornin' sunshine," the owner of the shoes drawls to him.

He freezes. His heart in his ears is almost too loud for him to hear her ask, "You hungry?"

* * *

 

Kowalski's has the best hoagie Jason's eaten in his life, Jewish food or not, and Dr. Miller (but-call-me-April) lets him inhale one then buys him another. He's pretty sure this is how kids get sold to labs for experimentation. His stomach doesn't give a damn. Besides, she's not a lot bigger than he is and, he's sure, he could take her if he had to. As long as she doesn't have any friends. And from the look of things (they're not being followed) and her conversation (about classes she teaches about languages or something like that)-- she doesn't.

He sits with his doggie bag full of leftover sub and cookies and fruit salad and sips at the milkshake she bought him. Realizes he hasn't said a word since he woke up and not only is that weird as hell but it's rude. He stares between the bag of food, her, the card she's holding out to him with an address scratched on the back of it. It's even weirder not to take it, so he does, reads it a few times while his stupid, slow brain figures out that it's a Diamond District address.

Yeah, that's not happening.

"Thanks." He slides out of the booth and does his best to make sure he's not running for his life. He makes sure to grab the food, though. The card goes in the next trash can he sees.

But winter's hit early or maybe global warming is real, Jason's not sure he cares which one it is. What he does care about is that his sneakers have holes through the bottoms and his feet have been numb for six hours and if Willis has to pick him up from the ER for frostbite, Jason's gonna die. Jason doesn't want to die and his memory has always been perfect so he steals a few subway passes and is in the Diamond District no more than two days after he ditches Dr. Miller (but-call-me-April) at Kowalski's.

There's a doorman. He braces his shoulders as he makes for the revolving door, ready to run for it-- into or out of the building remains to be seen-- but the guy just tips his cap and lets Jason go by.

It's less that he doesn't want to die, he discovers, more that he'd rather have some control over how it happens. And if choosing to become an illegal lab experiment or have his organs harvested versus letting Willis kill him is the choice, well, that's an easy choice to make.

He stands outside the door for ten minutes straight, shifting his weight from foot to foot, weighing the pros and cons. It's easier to do that inside where it's warm. The feeling is coming back to his feet-- a burning sort of pleasure-pain-- and he's horribly aware of how wet through his socks are. Fabric swollen and clinging and making damp noises when he even thinks about moving. Jason stops fidgeting. He knocks on Dr. Miller's door.

April doesn't know why she gives him her card or her address. Hell she doesn't actually expect him to show up. Janine makes a lot of panicked mouth sounds at April inviting a street kid into her home. Something about him possibly stealing all her valuables and April's response was, "As long as he doesn't take my cat. Stuff is replaceable. People aren't."

Somewhere, Katherine Adler is immensely proud of her granddaughter.

Still, she doesn't expect a knock at her door two days later. (She told her doorman, Saul, that a kid might come through. Ratty clothes, holy sneakers. Prettiest damn blue eyes on a boy not yet a teenager, and if he came. To let him in) --

She opens the door in her ratty Brown sweatshirt and a well-worn pair of jeans. Horatio is draped around her shoulders gnawing on a curly lock of blonde hair. She blinks and steps aside to let Jason in.

"How d'you feel about borscht?"

Jason blinks at her. The growth attached to her neck is a cat-- he's heard of hairless cats but never actually seen one before and the sight disturbing. Coming from him, that means something.

"Dunno," he says, suspicious, "What is it?"

But he knows she can't be here just to harvest the organs of Gotham's wayward youth. For one thing, the apartment smells recognizably like food and, more important still, there are books everywhere. Not the fake books from ritzy hotels, either. Piled on shelves, stacked on a table, some open, most with bookmarks. Under the smell of something delicious cooking (there are vegetables in it; not counting the hoagies he can't remember the last vegetables he ate) the scent of books is pervasive. Sweet old paper, sharp new ink. The kitchen's bar has a mess of textbooks and notepads open and sprawling-- she must have been studying.

He's not sure what the hell would make any normal adult want to study anything they weren't required to-- but then normal adults didn't feed and take in random kids who smelled like they hadn't bathed in a month so it wasn't Jason's place to judge.

Seized by the sudden awareness of just how little he suited this place he shoved his hands in his pockets-- his fingers were still cold, his legs burned with the return of blood and warmth. "Uh. Sorry to interrupt. I can leave? If you're, like, busy."

She let's him in, and feels Horatio perk his head in interest, a plaintive, curious sound rumbling up from his chest. Horatio, because he's a cat (well, alien cat. But April will drop the alien bomb on this kid when she knows he isn't going to shank her or something), leaps from her shoulder to the floor gracefully and trails them into the apartment.

It's organized for April, which means there are books on literally every surface suited for housing books, and she has textbooks and notebooks spread across the kitchen bar. She's undertaking the Kryptonian language as part of her tenure-track obligations.

"It's a sour soup. S'pretty popular in Europe. My family's Russian on th'one side. S'my grandmother's recipe. It's made outta beets." She padded to the soup pot to inspect its progress, "I got bread in th'oven." And paused.

She turned to frown at him and said, "I wouldna extended the invitation if I didn't mean for you t'take it kiddo. You look half froze. You want a blanket to wrap up in or a shower? Bathroom door locks from th’inside.”

He thinks about showering for all of a second before something in his throat closes up and he shakes his head jerkily. "No! No. I mean-- I don't have other clothes. But thanks."

He's pretty sure the burning in his face isn't coming in from the cold anymore but some species of shame. Panicked and not about to cry in front of a stranger (a stranger who he still can't be sure won't harvest his organs in the night at that) he looks away from her. At the baseboards, the back of the sofa, the weird cat. The cat must know he's looking because it stares right back, mellow and maybe curious and altogether unlike most cats he's met.

This cat, he decides, is his new favorite. Even if it does mostly resemble a monstrous pile of loose skin he had a nightmare about once.

"A blanket? Would be nice, maybe." Then, before he loses the gall to ask, "Can I read your books?" He's seen more than one collection of Shakespeare already on her shelves and amid the textbooks more spines sporting alien landscapes and spaceships than he's seen outside the library. He hopes, vaguely, that she sorts her books the same way as the library. That'll make them easier to comb through.

She nods, "Mmkay moonpie. You change your mind, lemme know. Probably I still got some of my exes crap floatin' around." She turns back to the stove to give him the illusion of privacy. She knows how much she hates people seeing her cry.

Horatio tilts his head, meows and ambles over to nudge against Jason's ankles.

April says, "Mmyup. I got about three million afghans my grandmama knitted." She puts the lid back on the pot and takes the long way around the bar counter to fetch Jason her biggest, softest, warmest blanket from the closet, "Here y'go sug', and read anything you like. Books're meant to be manhandled."

The blanket requires both his arms to hold it folded together until he gets it to the couch. He breathes solidly through his nose and squats to beckon and pet the cat. It’s not quite like petting a peach. Maybe if a peach had gone a day without a shave. The cat has no whiskers and Jason feels a surge of inexplicable kinship with it— he hopes it’s never gotten stuck somewhere too small.

Checking to make sure April isn’t looking— habit even though he has permission — he makes straight for her Dune boxed set. He’s been waitlisted at the library for them for a year. Every time his turn comes up they can’t get a hold of him and so the next person gets them. Yet another reason he hates Willis. The bastard can’t take down a message from the answering machine so Jason can get his free books.

Still unobserved he starts out with the blanket across his lap, trying to keep his feet off the sofa. Thirty pages into the book he’s barefoot and working on becoming one with the blanket and sofa. It’s a slow merger but Jason is willing to dedicate the time it requires.

Borscht, as it turns out, is bizarre and also the most-delicious vegetable anything he’s eaten in his life. It beats the hell out of Campbell’s condensed soups which he’s eaten hot, cold, and (once, regrettably) frozen. “How’d you learn to cook like this?” Jason can manage heating things from frozen or cans but fresh ingredients haven’t been in his family’s apartment in years. “You’re really good at it.”

Horatio, once Jason and the couch become one, takes up residence around Jason's shoulders and starts grooming him. His bizarre half purr half growl shaking his entire little feline body.

April returns to cooking and studying, absent and easy to let Jason do what he wants to. Every resource she found about fostering troubled kids, said it was best to let them get comfortable and to earn their trust. April's bad at people, but she's pretty good about letting people have space.

She glances over when she hears two telltale thuds and there's Jason, basically a blanket burrito, with Horatio nuzzling the side of his face, happy as bees in a wildflower field. He picked Dune. She immediately wants to keep him forever.

She serves him on the couch, brings a big bowl and a huge piece of bread and settles on the armchair across from him, "I grew up in a big house in th'south. Had nannies t'mind me mostly, but my grandmama would come an' visit. She always made sure we had some real-world knowledge. Cookin' was somethin' she and I liked and liked doin' t'gether. When I left home..." she pauses, "Well I wasn't quite fifteen. Grandmama showed up at my dorm and spent th'whole first year I was in college makin' sure I knew damn near every recipe in th'family and then some."

“She sounds cool.” He tried to imagine what having a grandmother is like. He doesn’t know anything about his parents’ parents, never gave them a second thought. Then he tries to feed Horatio one of the chunkier root vegetables from his soup— sharing is caring after all and judging by the sound of things the cat has decided they’re going to be friends.

“Why’d you leave? You had nannies and shi-- stuff. That’s gotta be better than Gotham.”

April nodded, "She's still alive. You ever heard a th'actress Katherine Adler?" April has a lot o great memories with her grandmother. She wonders if Jason would want to meet her.

She's quiet when she says, "Remember how I told you my daddy was a bit of a mean drunk?" she cleared her throat, "He drank hisself t'death. I found him dead in his study when I was fourteen. I was a'ready smart as hell. An' aside from my grandmama I've never really got on with th'rest of my family. We ain't really... well. My mama and sisters ain't none of'em keen on me so much being smarter'n them. I wanted out. And trust me, Gotham's a helluva lot better'n bein' ignored or mistreated by turns by th'folks who're supposed t'love you."

She swallows, "Only real love I ever knew, I learned from my grandmother."

His soup and bread are finished and he sits with the bowl in his lap, listening to her explain herself. “I wish my dad was dead.” He’s jealous and he knows it’s not the sort of thing he should be jealous of, April’s grief, but he wishes he had it just the same. To have a father worth grieving— he can’t imagine it. “I don’t have grandparents. Or parents. I mean technically I do but... it’d be better if I didn’t.”

Then, abruptly, “What was Katherine Adler in?” He has no idea who she is but April seems to like talking about her more.

April doesn't argue. She grieves the man her father was. Not the man he became, and she's never been the kind of person to tell other people how they should emotion.

"Well, she's old as dirt but you wouldn't know it t'look at her." She says, "You familiar with Casablanca or Gone With th'Wind?"

“I’ve heard of them?” He knows they’re old movies. He knows they’re famous. He’s never seen either.

She grins and put Casablanca on the big screen.

* * *

 

And that’s how it starts. Jason gets invested in old movies the same way he does books— rapt attention, naked emotion, near-perfect recall for the details. Every week or weekend or as often as Jason can stand to leave home (more often than he’d imagined; he’s shocked more and more at the way things decay between absences) to visit April and watch a movie or read her books or pet Horatio or raid her fridge. After a few months, he managed to stay a full night sacked out on her sofa cuddling her cat.

Over breakfast in early spring— the sun isn’t up and April gets up too goddamn early for work— April is still bleary and monosyllabic over her tea when it hits him. His eyes go wide and he stares into his tea for a minute straight without moving.

“My name’s Jason,” he blurts, voice breaking a little. “I. I don’t think I’ve said. Ever. I’m Jason Todd.”

Its nice, the pattern they fall into. She makes sure Jason has a key and makes it clear that the guest room is his. More often than not he sacks out on the couch for a few hours but she doesn't question him. It's his decision.

"Jason hunh?" She grins, "Well Jason, finish y'breakfast and tell me what you thought of Lord of th'Flies -- I'm teachin' it t'my freshman seminar and I swear they're all a buncha morons."

If when Jason leaves, she's sometimes slipped a warmer shirt, or a new pair of shoes, (or once, a really cozy zip up, fleece-lined hoodie) into his backpack. Well, she's gone before he can question it. She doesn't make a big production of it.

 


End file.
